Productivity

Google and Microsoft are handing Search campaigns to AI this month. Small advertisers have days, not weeks, to set guardrails.

Google's auto-upgrade to AI Max began September 1 for legacy Search formats, and Microsoft made its own AI Max generally available and on-by-default for new campaigns — two simultaneous shifts that move keyword matching, ad copy, and landing-page routing to automation.

By Esi Boateng· Productivity tools·2026-09-13·3 min read

The two largest search ad platforms decided to move Search campaigns to AI in the same window. Google began auto-upgrading legacy Search formats to AI Max in September, covering Automatically Created Assets and campaign-level broad match, with the Dynamic Search Ads sunset pushed to February 2027. Microsoft made its own AI Max generally available and enabled it by default for any new Search campaign. Three levers, keyword matching, ad copy generation, and landing-page routing, leave advertiser control on both platforms at roughly the same time.

For a small business running a Search account, that’s a structural change to who decides which query gets a click, what copy that click sees, and which page it lands on.

Google is preserving legacy URL controls at upgrade and has pushed the full Dynamic Search Ads sunset to February 2027, but the September upgrades to Automatically Created Assets and broad-match campaigns proceed on schedule. Microsoft’s version ships with brand inclusions, brand exclusions, and term exclusions for text asset generation, all of which have to be configured proactively or defaults govern.

The performance case comes from Microsoft. Internal data covering June–August 2026 analyzed 44 advertiser-run A/B experiments and reported a spend-weighted conversion uplift of roughly 13.6%. Read the footnotes. Only 10 of the 44 tests were statistically significant (lower confidence bound 8.2%); 34 never cleared significance. The headline number is spend-weighted, which tilts it toward larger accounts.

There’s also a gate most small accounts won’t clear. Turning on any AI Max feature in Microsoft requires conversion-based bidding, and conversion-based bidding needs about 30 conversions in 30 days to function well. Below that, the AI layer isn’t really available; you’re on manual whether you wanted to be or not.

The practical sequence for the next two weeks is unglamorous: pull a pre-migration baseline so seasonal noise doesn’t get read as AI lift, set brand and term exclusions on both platforms, and decide account by account whether the 30-conversion threshold is realistic. This is the same audit-first posture the moment keeps asking for, alongside Google’s Gemini 3.8 Flash update to AI Mode and HubSpot’s move to package AEO as a standalone product. Defaults are the new policy layer.

Sources